Cockatiels at Seven (12 page)

“Good boy, Scout,” I said. I reached in my other pocket and found a couple of cheese crackers I’d picked up from the floor of the car. I offered Scout one. He took it eagerly, but it seemed like normal canine eagerness, not the desperation of an abandoned and starving animal.

I knocked several more times. I called out, “Mr. Walker? Jasper? Mr. Bass?” a couple of times.

No answer.

I peered into the front window. The house was—well, empty wasn’t the word. Less junked up than the yard, but not by much. But empty of people, as far as I could see. Not unoccupied, though. On a coffee table in the living room I could see a pizza box and a couple of beer and Pepsi cans, none of them dust-covered. Someone had been here recently.

Scout followed as I left the porch. He seemed happy to have me around. I wanted to circle the house, maybe find someplace to climb in, but I couldn’t very easily do that carrying Timmy. Too much junk to trip over, not to mention the undergrowth to wade through. No wonder Sherlock Holmes had stayed a bachelor.

Just then, Timmy threw his head back and began uttering wordless howls of misery.

I set him down and squatted down beside him so I could get a better look at him. And also to get his mouth a little farther from my ear.

“It’s okay,” I said, while scanning for injuries.

He sniffled for a few seconds and then hurled himself back into my arms. He didn’t feel overheated—if anything, a little chilled, so perhaps I’d been overdoing the car air conditioning on his account. And judging from the Hansel and Gretel-style trail of Cheerios leading from the car to my feet, he couldn’t have eaten enough to give himself a stomach ache. Okay, he was genuinely upset—though I couldn’t tell why. I sat on the ground for perhaps twenty minutes, rocking him and murmuring whatever soothing words came to mind. Scout sat beside me, whining, wagging his tail, and intermittently licking whatever parts of Timmy he could reach.

About ten seconds after the crying finally subsided, Timmy popped his head up.

“Juice?” he asked. “Please?”

I took him back to the car and fished in the cooler for another sippy cup. He grabbed it with both hands and began gulping the contents with the sort of intensity you’d expect from a traveler who’d just crossed the Sahara. With him safely occupied, I set him down at my feet and glanced back at the house, wondering if it might be a good idea to see if I could pick one of the locks and snoop inside. No, probably not—I’d have to take Timmy with me, and even if I managed to snoop without leaving traces, I suspected I couldn’t keep him from doing so. Besides—

Never turn your back on a two-year-old. I heard Timmy smack his lips and sigh with satisfaction, and by the time I glanced down, he was vanishing into the shrubbery.

I spent what seemed like an half an hour playing tag with Timmy. Timmy and the dog, who seemed to think we’d invented a really superior game. The two of them were better suited to darting through small openings in the vines and shrubbery, and more uninhibited about crawling onto and into dangerous bits of rusting machinery.

I finally sat down in a clearing, out of breath and rapidly losing my temper. Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. Maybe I should go back to the car and find some bait. Some Cheerios, or maybe a candy bar. I had a few Snickers bars in the cooler, in case I needed a sudden jolt of energy. They weren’t on Timmy’s approved diet—in fact, candy bars of any kind
were on the list of things he wasn’t supposed to have under any circumstances. But if Karen was going to be that persnickety about his diet, she should stick around to supervise it herself.

Just then Scout stuck his head through some shrubbery and pulled it back. I pretended not to notice.

“I’ll just have to go back without him,” I said.

Scout stuck his head out again, as if he thought I might be talking to him.

“No idea where he’s gone.”

The shrubbery behind the dog rustled as if he were wagging his tail. From somewhere to my left, I heard a slight giggle.

“I should probably just go home for dinner,” I said.

“Want dinner,” came a voice from the shrubbery.

I peered in the direction the voice had come from.

“Timmy?” I asked. “Is that you?”

He giggled, and stuck his head out from behind some leaves. Then he ducked in again and giggled.

The leaves, I noticed with a sinking feeling, were poison ivy.

I managed to extricate Timmy from the poison ivy grove with promises of chocolate, though I had to wade through some of it to get back to the car. I postponed any notion of picking the lock and snooping inside Jasper Walker’s house. I knew that if I could get home and wash the poison ivy oil off myself and Timmy immediately, we might have a chance of escaping an outbreak of the dreaded rash. Then again, either I was having psychosomatic itching or it was already too late. For me, anyway. Dad always said that children didn’t develop sensitivity to poison ivy until after they’d been exposed several times, so Timmy would probably be all right. Then again, active as Timmy was, he could have already used up his immunity. I strapped him into his car seat and took off.

But as I reached the fork in the driveway, I saw the tail end of a red pickup truck disappearing in the direction of the canary farm. I hesitated. Washing off the poison ivy oil was important. So was finding Karen.

What the hell, I decided. I might not find the denizens of the canary farm home another time. The car and truck skeletons strewn on either side of the road
made it difficult to turn, but I finally managed it. As we rattled down the lane, I told myself that if Aubrey Hamilton was a friendly soul, maybe I’d even beg the use of a bathroom to wash off the poison ivy oil. Come to think of it, the first aid kit probably contained some Fels-Naptha soap, which Dad recommended for that purpose.

I pulled up behind the pickup in front of a large, comfortable-looking farmhouse. The grass was a little unkempt, but the house itself looked in good repair, and the white board siding had been painted not that long ago. To the left and a little behind the house was a large barn, also in good repair, as was the fence around the barnyard.

A man came out of the house and stood at the top of the steps looking down at me as I got out of the car. He was youngish—probably around twenty-five—but had a faintly worn air about him, as if life hadn’t treated him that well. And if we were friends, I’d have tried to convince him that nature had not designed him to wear a goatee—it made his already pointy chin look even pointier.

“Can I help you?” he said. He leaned on the top rail of the porch. He looked ill-at-ease but not unwelcoming, as if his country dweller’s ingrained suspicion of unexpected visitors was at war with his hope that we might be here to buy canaries.

“You must be Aubrey Hamilton,” I said. I strode over and shook his hand. “You run the canary farm, right?”

“Are you looking to buy a bird?” he asked. A little too eagerly—I wondered if perhaps the bird business wasn’t going too well.

“Sorry, no,” I said. “I’m looking for the guy who lives next door. Mr. Bass. Have you seen him recently?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“What do you want with the old guy, anyway?” he said. Was he frowning in suspicion of me, or in disbelief that anyone would voluntarily seek out his neighbor’s company?

“I’m actually trying to find his nephew, Jasper Walker.”

The frown deepened. Definitely suspicion.

“Jasper is or was married to my friend Karen,” I went on. “And she left her son Timmy with me yesterday.”

I indicated the car, where Timmy was chugging his juice. Hamilton barely glanced at him.

“Karen said she would just be gone for a little while,” I said. “And that was yesterday morning. She’s not answering my calls. I’m checking anyplace she might have gone and anyone who might have seen her.”

“I haven’t seen anyone next door for days,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Ah, well,” I said. “Look, this may sound odd, but—Timmy got loose and wandered into a patch of poison ivy. I’d really like to wash him off. The sooner I do that, the less chance that he’ll develop a rash.”

Hamilton hesitated, clearly torn between a reluctance to appear inhospitable and an even stronger reluctance to let a wayward toddler into his house.

“We could just use that,” I said, pointing to a green garden hose neatly coiled and hanging from a hook by the side of the house.

“Okay,” he said. “Let me bring you a towel.”

“He might have invited us in,” I grumbled to Timmy as I stripped his clothes and diaper off.

Though once I began soaping him up and rinsing him off, I realized that it was an extraordinarily messy project, and I’d have been mortified at doing it inside a stranger’s house.

“Sorry to put you to this trouble,” I told Hamilton when he returned with the towel. “But you probably know how bad poison ivy can be for a little kid.”

“No trouble at all,” he said, though clearly he was getting tired of having us underfoot. He kept glancing over at the barn.

“Is that where you keep the birds?” I asked, pointing to the barn.

“What?” he said, looking startled.

“Your canaries. Is that where you keep them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Canaries, cockatiels, and parakeets. Are you interested in buying—sorry, you already said you weren’t.”

“How’s business?” I asked.

“Slow,” he said. “The market’s depressed. Too many breeders. Damned things are eating me out of house and home. I could give you a good deal on a pair of cockatiels, if you like.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m not much of a bird-fancier. But I’ll ask my family if anyone’s in the market for a pet bird.”

He nodded gloomily.

“Maybe you should have stuck to poodles,” I said.

“Poodles?”

“The Prancing Poodle Kennels,” I said. “I gather you’re not breeding poodles anymore?”

“No money in poodles either.”

“So when was the last time you saw Jasper Walker?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

“I’m still trying to find him. Have you seen him within the last few days?”

“No,” he said. “Not for months. I didn’t even know he was back in town. Last I heard, he’d gotten fired from his job at the college and gone up to D.C. to look for work.”

“Have you seen anyone over there lately?”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect to. Old Mr. Bass is in the nursing home, you know. Place has been empty for years.”

I nodded. Apparently Jasper—or whoever had left the beer cans and pizza box—had been coming and going unseen. But maybe I should keep that to myself for now.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, handing him the towel. “And if you see anything of Jasper or Karen, could you give me a call?”

I wrote my cell phone number on a sheet torn from my notebook and handed it to him.

“Okay,” he said. “But I don’t expect I’ll see anything. It’s—hey! Get away from there!”

I turned to see Timmy crawling through the barnyard fence. I gave chase, and managed to catch up with him before he reached the barn.

“Want see horsie,” Timmy complained as I picked him up.

“There aren’t any horsies there,” I said. “Just birdies. Sorry,” I added to Hamilton, who had only just caught
up with us, and was seriously out of breath. “You turn your back on him for a second and he’s gone.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Want see birdies,” Timmy said.

Hamilton looked uneasy. He kept glancing at the barn and then back at Timmy.

“Look, I know he’d like to see the birds, but the last time a kid got in there he opened all the cages. Took us hours to catch the damned birds again.”

“I understand,” I said. “I doubt if Timmy’s old enough to open cages, but it’s time I got him home anyway. Thanks a lot.”

Hamilton stood in the barnyard watching as I carried Timmy back to the car, wrestled him into clean clothes, strapped him into the car seat, and drove off.

“Is he hiding something, do you think?” I asked Timmy. “Or is he just not a sociable kind of guy?”

“Doggie,” Timmy said.

Was that an incisive insult to Aubrey? No, Timmy had spotted Scout lying in the middle of the driveway to Hiram Bass’s house. He lifted his head when he saw us, and his tail thumped a couple of times, and then, when we drove by, he put it back on his paws again.

“If you’re still here when I come back, I’ll call the animal shelter,” I said as I watched the dog in my rearview mirror.

Back at home, I managed to get in a quick shower while Timmy took the shoelaces out of several pairs of Michael’s shoes. I was down in the laundry room, putting our potentially poison-ivy contaminated clothes into the washer while Timmy ran around wearing nothing but a diaper, with a torn pillowcase over his head,
pretending to be a ghost, when my cell phone rang. It was Michael.

“So do you think you can find a baby-sitter for Timmy tonight?” he said.

“Possibly, if I recruit someone from a few counties away, where he’s not already notorious,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you scored tickets for something so hot that I’ll hate Timmy forever if he makes me miss it.”

“Actually, I was trying to arrange a dinner with Dr. Driscoll and his wife. At the Caerphilly Inn. I’m the department rep to one of his committees this year, and I’m supposed to ingratiate myself.”

Granted, the prospect of dinner at the Inn was mouth-watering, but was Michael really expecting me to play charming faculty wife tonight? With Timmy on my hands and Karen’s disappearance on my mind?

“You’ll love the Driscolls,” he said. “He’s an avid bird-watcher—over eight hundred species on his life list. He’ll tell you all about it if you ask. And his wife needlepoints and arranges flowers. They’re elderly, and go to bed early, so I agreed we’d meet them there at five-thirty. That way they can still drive home before dark.”

“You’re telling me this so I won’t mind missing dinner at the Inn to stay home and take care of Timmy. Who is this ghastly Dr. Driscoll, anyway?”

“Head of the financial administration department.”

“Karen’s department? Okay, you’re on. I’m sure somebody around here owes me a favor.”

“Let’s hope it’s a big favor,” he said.